Eyes will be on New York and the Bay Area when it comes to setting the tone. On the West Coast, a major May Day plan has already changed at the last minute. The plan had been to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in support of bridge unions, which have been without a contract for a year. The Golden Gate Bridge Labor Coalition renounced its original bridge blockade plans on Saturday, however, asking supporters instead to join its hard picket lines shutting down ferries and buses (the coalition of bridge worker unions will be striking that day). The Port of Oakland Longshoremen have called for a daytime work stoppage and over 4,000 Bay Area nurses also without a contract will be striking, although the majority of May Day activity has been outside of union organizing.

In New York, back-to-back (and overlapping) actions will be taking place across Manhattan and in some outer-borough areas. Numbers in the tens of thousands are expected at a permitted “solidarity march” in the afternoon from Union Square to Wall Street, jointly organized by OWS, the Alliance for Labor Rights, Immigrant Rights, Jobs for All and the May 1st Coalition. Organizers have been keen to stress that different marches and actions carry different levels of risk. Schedules demarcate rallies as permitted or unpermitted, or “green” or “red” (from a color-code for assigning risk dating back to the late ’90s anti-globalization movement) — enabling individuals with, say, precarious immigration statuses, to avoid activities that might put them at risk of deportation.

There will be unpermitted, unpredictable actions a-plenty — including an autonomously organized Wild Cat march, with the “wild cats” consisting of various anarchists, anti-capitalists, anti-authoritarians and their allies, beginning in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Its call states, “if we wanted to protest we could carry a sign and walk within police barricades, safely cordoned off in a free speech zone. On May 1st, we aren’t working and we aren’t protesting. We are striking.”

Much of the activity will depend less on the strikers themselves than on the police response and crackdown. The Village Voice’s Nick Pinto noted on Twitter Sunday that according to a “well-sourced” colleague, the NYPD assigned to cover May Day demonstrations “have been ordered to bring ‘hats and bats’.” Conveniently, New York will see increased security and police vigilance on May 1, following warnings from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security about potential terror risks on the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death (even though the Al Qaida leader was actually killed on May 2. and Police Commissioner Ray Kelley notes there is no known terror threat to the city). At a Sunday press conference, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, with regards to policing on May Day, “We will do what we normally do and find the right balance.” So if we are to go by the normal police response to Occupy mobilizations in New York, we can expect vast police presence, mass arrests, aggressive crowd handling, swinging batons and pepper spray at the very least.

In my view, there is little point in predicting in advance what the May Day General Strike will do. As I argued, writing in the most recent n+1 Occupy! Gazette, Occupy’s zeitgeist-shifting events have never gone according to plan. Even setting up camp at Zuccotti Park — the unmiraculous corporate plaza, which became the epicenter of a radical political opening — was a backup plan after the first choice spot in Downtown Manhattan was blocked by police on September 17.  And so I’ll repeat here what I wrote in Occupy!, I don’t know what a success might look like on Tuesday, rather “I hope for a May Day, which— like other Occupy actions have—re-orients how we feel about failure and success altogether.”

Until they did.

Revolutions are always like this: at first all men are brothers and anything is possible, and then, if you’re lucky, the romance of that heady moment ripens into a relationship, instead of a breakup, an abusive marriage, or a murder-suicide. Occupy had its golden age, when those who never before imagined living side-by-side with homeless people found themselves in adjoining tents in public squares.

All sorts of other equalizing forces were present, not least the police brutality that battered the privileged the way that inner-city kids are used to being battered all the time. Part of what we had in common was what we were against: the current economy and the principle of insatiable greed that made it run, as well as the emotional and economic privatization that accompanied it.

This is a system that damages people, and its devastation was on display as never before in the early months of Occupy and related phenomena like the “We are the 99%” website. When it was people facing foreclosure, or who’d lost their jobs, or were thrashing around under avalanches of college or medical debt, they weren’t hard to accept as us, and not them.

And then came the people who’d been damaged far more, the psychologically fragile, the marginal, and the homeless — some of them endlessly needy and with a huge capacity for disruption. People who had come to fight the power found themselves staying on to figure out available mental-health resources, while others who had wanted to experience a democratic society on a grand scale found themselves trying to solve sanitation problems.

And then there was the violence.

The Faces of Violence

The most important direct violence Occupy faced was, of course, from the state, in the form of the police using maximum sub-lethal force on sleepers in tents, mothers with children, unarmed pedestrians, young women already penned up, unresisting seated students, poets, professors, pregnant women, wheelchair-bound occupiers and octogenarians. It has been a sustained campaign of police brutality from Wall Street to Washington State the likes of which we haven’t seen in 40 years.

On the part of activists, there were also a few notable incidents of violence in the hundreds of camps, especially violence against women. The mainstream media seemed to think this damned the Occupy movement, though it made the camps, at worst, a whole lot like the rest of the planet, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, seethes with violence against women. But these were isolated incidents.

That old line of songster Woody Guthrie is always handy in situations like this: “Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen.” The police have been going after occupiers with projectile weapons, clubs and tear gas, sending some of them to the hospital and leaving more than a few others traumatized and fearful. That’s the six-gun here.

But it all began with the fountain pens, slashing through peoples’ lives, through national and international economies, through the global markets. These were wielded by the banksters, the “vampire squid,” the deregulators in D.C., the men — and with the rarest of exceptions they were men — who stole the world.

That’s what Occupy came together to oppose, the grandest violence by scale, the least obvious by impact. No one on Wall Street ever had to get his suit besmirched by carrying out a foreclosure eviction himself. Cities provided that service for free to the banks (thereby further impoverishing themselves as they created new paupers out of old taxpayers).  And the police clubbed their opponents for them, over and over, everywhere across the United States.

The grand thieves invented ever more ingenious methods, including those sliced and diced derivatives, to crush the hopes and livelihoods of the many. This is the terrible violence that Occupy was formed to oppose. Don’t ever lose sight of that.

Oakland’s Beautiful Nonviolence

Now that we’re done remembering the major violence, let’s talk about Occupy Oakland. A great deal of fuss has been made about two incidents in which mostly young people affiliated with Occupy Oakland damaged some property and raised some hell.

The mainstream media and some faraway pundits weighed in on those Bay Area incidents as though they determined the meaning and future of the transnational Occupy phenomenon.  Perhaps some of them even hoped, consciously or otherwise, that harped on enough these might divide or destroy the movement. So it’s important to recall that the initial impact of Occupy Oakland was the very opposite of violent, stunningly so, in ways that were intentionally suppressed.

Occupy Oakland began in early October as a vibrant, multiracial gathering. A camp was built at Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza, and thousands received much-needed meals and healthcare for free from well-organized volunteers. Sometimes called the Oakland Commune, it was consciously descended from some of the finer aspects of an earlier movement born in Oakland, the Black Panthers, whose free breakfast programs should perhaps be as well-remembered and more admired than their macho posturing.

A compelling and generous-spirited General Assembly took place nightly and then biweekly in which the most important things on Earth were discussed by wildly different participants.  Once, for instance, I was in a breakout discussion group that included Native American, white, Latino, and able-bodied and disabled Occupiers, and in which I was likely the eldest participant; another time, a bunch of peacenik grandmothers dominated my group.

This country is segregated in so many terrible ways — and then it wasn’t for those glorious weeks when civil society awoke and fell in love with itself. Everyone showed up; everyone talked to everyone else; and in little tastes, in fleeting moments, the old divides no longer divided us and we felt like we could imagine ourselves as one society. This was the dream of the promised land — this land, that is, without its bitter divides. Honey never tasted sweeter, and power never felt better.

Now here’s something astonishing. While the camp was in existence, crime went down 19 percent in Oakland, a statistic the city was careful to conceal. “It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland,” the police chief wrote to the mayor in an email that local news station KTVU later obtained and released to little fanfare. Pay attention: Occupy was so powerful a force for nonviolence that it was already solving Oakland’s chronic crime and violence problems just by giving people hope and meals and solidarity and conversation.

The police attacking the camp knew what the rest of us didn’t: Occupy was abating crime, including violent crime, in this gritty, crime-ridden city. “You gotta give them hope, “ said an elected official across the bay once upon a time — a city supervisor named Harvey Milk. Occupy was hope we gave ourselves, the dream come true. The city did its best to take the hope away violently at 5 a.m. on October 25th. The sleepers were assaulted; their belongings confiscated and trashed. Then, Occupy Oakland rose again. Many thousands of nonviolent marchers shut down the Port of Oakland in a stunning display of popular power on November 2nd.

That night, some kids did the smashy-smashy stuff that everyone gets really excited about.  (They even spray-painted “smashy” on a Rite Aid drugstore in giant letters.) When we talk about people who spray-paint and break windows and start bonfires in the street and shove people and scream and run around, making a demonstration into something way too much like the punk rock shows of my youth, let’s keep one thing in mind: they didn’t send anyone to the hospital, drive any seniors from their homes, spread despair and debt among the young, snatch food and medicine from the desperate, or destroy the global economy.

That said, they are still a problem.  They are the bait the police take and the media go to town with.  They create a situation a whole lot of us don’t like and that drives away many who might otherwise participate or sympathize. They are, that is, incredibly bad for a movement, and represent a form of segregation by intimidation.

But don’t confuse the pro-vandalism Occupiers with the vampire squid or the up-armored robocops who have gone after us almost everywhere.  Though their means are deeply flawed, their ends are not so different than yours. There’s no question that they should improve their tactics or maybe just act tactically, let alone strategically, and there’s no question that a lot of other people should stop being so apocalyptic about it.

Those who advocate for nonviolenceat Occupy should remember that nonviolence is at best a great spirit of love and generosity, not a prissy enforcement squad. After all, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who gets invoked all the time when such issues come up, didn’t go around saying grumpy things about Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.

Violence Against the Truth

Of course, a lot of people responding to these incidents in Oakland are actually responding to fictional versions of them. In such cases, you could even say that some journalists were doing violence against the truth of what happened in Oakland on November 2nd and January 28th.

The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reported on the day’s events this way:

“Among the most violent incidents that occurred Saturday night was in front of the YMCA at 23rd Street and Broadway. Police corralled protesters in front of the building and several dozen protesters stormed into the Y, apparently to escape from the police, city officials and protesters said.  Protesters damaged a door and a few fixtures, and frightened those inside the gym working out, said Robert Wilkins, president of the YMCA of the East Bay.”

Wilkins was apparently not in the building, and first-person testimony recounts that a YMCA staff member welcomed the surrounded and battered protesters, and once inside, some were so terrified they pretended to work out on exercise machines to blend in.

I wrote this to the journalists who described the incident so peculiarly: “What was violent about [activists] fleeing police engaging in wholesale arrests and aggressive behavior? Even the YMCA official who complains about it adds, ‘The damage appears pretty minimal.’ And you call it violence? That’s sloppy.”

The reporter who responded apologized for what she called her “poor word choice” and said the piece was meant to convey police violence as well.

When the police are violent against activists, journalists tend to frame it as though there were violence in some vaguely unascribable sense that implicates the clobbered as well as the clobberers. In, for example, the build-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, the mainstream media kept portraying the right of the people peaceably to assemble as tantamount to terrorism and describing all the terrible things that the government or the media themselves speculated we might want to do (but never did).

Some of this was based on the fiction of tremendous activist violence in Seattle in 1999 that the New York Times in particular devoted itself to promulgating. That the police smashed up nonviolent demonstrators and constitutional rights pretty badly in both Seattle and New York didn’t excite them nearly as much. Don’t forget that before the obsession with violence arose, the smearing of Occupy was focused on the idea that people weren’t washing very much, and before that the framework for marginalization was that Occupy had “no demands.” There’s always something.

Keep in mind as well that Oakland’s police department is on the brink of federal receivership for not having made real amends for old and well-documented problems of violence, corruption and mismanagement, and that it was the police department, not the Occupy Oakland demonstrators, which used tear gas, clubs, smoke grenades and rubber bullets on January 28th. It’s true that a small group vandalized City Hall after the considerable police violence, but that’s hardly what the plans were at the outset of the day.

The action on January 28th that resulted in 400 arrests and a media conflagration was called Move-In Day. There was a handmade patchwork banner that proclaimed “Another Oakland Is Possible” and a children’s contingent with pennants, balloons and strollers. Occupy Oakland was seeking to take over an abandoned building so that it could reestablish the community, the food programs and the medical clinic it had set up last fall. It may not have been well planned or well executed, but it was idealistic.

Despite this, many people who had no firsthand contact with Occupy Oakland inveighed against it or even against the whole Occupy movement. If only that intensity of fury were to be directed at the root cause of it all, the colossal economic violence that surrounds us.

All of which is to say, for anyone who hadn’t noticed, that the honeymoon is over.

Now for the Real Work

The honeymoon is, of course, the period when you’re so in love you don’t notice differences that will eventually have to be worked out one way or another. Most relationships begin as though you were coasting downhill.  Then come the flatlands, followed by the hills where you’re going to have to pedal hard, if you don’t just abandon the bike.

Occupy might just be the name we’ve put on a great groundswell of popular outrage and a rebirth of civil society too deep, too broad, to be a movement. A movement is an ocean wave: this is the whole tide turning from Cairo to Moscow to Athens to Santiago to Chicago. Nevertheless, the American swell in this tide involves a delicate alliance between liberals and radicals, people who want to reform the government and campaign for particular gains, and people who wish the government didn’t exist and mostly want to work outside the system.  If the radicals should frighten the liberals as little as possible, surely the liberals have an equal obligation to get fiercer and more willing to confront — and to remember that nonviolence, even in its purest form, is not the same as being nice.

Surely the only possible answer to the tired question of where Occupy should go from here (as though a few public figures got to decide) is: everywhere. I keep being asked what Occupy should do next, but it’s already doing it. It is everywhere.

In many cities, outside the limelight, people are still occupying public space in tents and holding General Assemblies.  February 20th, for instance, was a national day of Occupy solidarity with prisoners; Occupiers are organizing on many fronts and planning for May Day, and a great many foreclosure defenses from Nashville to San Francisco have kept people in their homes and made banks renegotiate. Campus activism is reinvigorated, and creative and fierce discussions about college costs and student debt are underway, as is a deeper conversation about economics and ethics that rejects conventional wisdom about what is fair and possible.

Occupy is one catalyst or facet of the populist will you can see in a host of recent victories. The campaign against corporate personhood seems to be gaining momentum.  A popular environmental campaign made President Obama reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada, despite immense Republican and corporate pressure. In response to widespread outrage, the Susan B. Komen Foundation reversed its decision to defund cancer detection at Planned Parenthood.  Online campaigns have forced Apple to address its hideous labor issues, and the ever-heroic Coalition of Immokalee Workers at last brought Trader Joes into line with its fair wages for farmworkers campaign.

These genuine gains come thanks to relatively modest exercises of popular power.  They should act as reminders that we do have power and that its exercise can be popular. Some of last fall’s exhilarating conversations have faltered, but the great conversation that is civil society awake and arisen hasn’t stopped.

What happens now depends on vigorous participation, including yours, in thinking aloud together about who we are, what we want and how we get there, and then acting upon it. Go occupy the possibilities and don’t stop pedaling. And remember, it started with mad, passionate love.

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“I am a person living with HIV and I was held for over 30 hours in Santa Rita and denied my prescription medications on multiple occasions by jail staff,” one 28-year-old arrestee told Salon via email, asking to remain anonymous as his family are currently unaware of his HIV status. “I know three others with HIV and many others with psychiatric prescriptions who were also held without being given their meds,” he added.

Carey Lamprecht of the National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area Chapter and Occupy Legal collective confirmed that “two HIV positive individuals were held without access to medication for over two days at Santa Rita jail.” Lamprecht added that one man who usually takes anti-retroviral drugs every four to six hours went without a dose for over two days and was unable to access a legal counsel for more than a day while detained, as the large number of arrestees were constantly moved around the jail.

Different individuals living with HIV face different risks from missing doses, depending on their T-Cell, viral load counts, anti-retroviral therapy regimens and other factors. The risk, especially for individuals with low T-Cell counts is that the virus mutates rapidly and can develop resistance to medication if doses are inconsistent. The young man who spoke to Salon said that although his T-cell counts are “in the healthy range … none of the guards or medical staff ascertained any of this information” to determine the relative risks of detainees going without medication.

“It felt like we had disappeared. Deputies often didn’t know where individuals were and wandered from cell block to cell block looking for individuals to process,” the man said. “On multiple occasions, my cell block mic checked the guards and led chants, demanding in one voice medicine, food, and other necessities like toilet paper and maxi pads.”

Other stories about mistreatment published in Daily Kos could not be substantiated. Salon found no information to confirm rumors that female detainees were forced to urinate in front of male officers, that detainees were beaten in their cells or that guards sprayed tear gas into the cell vents.

The denial of medication appears to be the most common complaint. According to a release from the Occupy Oakland media team, “detained protesters were kept in painful zip tie handcuffs — some for 8 to 12 hours — were not allowed to access bathrooms and were not given medical treatment for injuries or illness.”

Claire, 28, a special education teacher for the Oakland Unified School District, was another such detainee. She arrived at Santa Rita a little after midnight Saturday, following her arrest as a part of the previous day’s Occupy actions. She suffers from severe depression and anxiety disorders, for which she takes a medication called Celexa twice a day.

“The first person I notified about my need for medication was my arresting officer (Hazelwood),” Claire told Salon, via email. “I believe he noted it somewhere in my paperwork. He told me that I would be able to see a nurse at Santa Rita, and that they have several antidepressants available there,”

On being seen by a nurse, Claire mentioned her condition again and that she had gone 24 hours without medication. “The nurse signed the form to indicate that I was cleared to be put into a holding cell. Several times over the course of the night and next day, I and a few others in my cell told guards outside that we needed medication, but were ignored,” she added.  During her detainment, Claire suffered from a mild but prolonged panic attack, during which she had difficulty breathing and controlling her muscles. She told Salon:

Around five p.m. on Sunday, a guard asked for the women who needed medication to come out of the holding cell, and said we would be processed and seen by a nurse. We were then fingerprinted and had mug shots taken. I again asked if I could see a nurse and explained my condition. I was told that I would not be able to see a nurse unless I wanted to stay in jail. The officer also stated that I would be getting out the following morning (Monday). Around midnight, we were released.

Alyssa Eisenberg, a 44-year-old Occupy activist and single mother, was also not given access to medication for 12 hours during her 18-hour detainment at Santa Rita. Eisenberg suffers from multiple sclerosis and retired early from social services work due to disability. She told Salon that she takes medication at least twice a day for pain and to aid with concentration, as her M.S. has led to cognitive dysfunction and memory loss.

“I was particularly concerned about the cognitive condition, about not understanding quickly what was going on in jail and struggling to process what guards were saying to me,” she said. Like others, Eisenberg informed a nurse of her medical condition and said that she saw at least two other people also express a need for medication. Eisenberg says she was detained for over 12 hours before being told that if she wanted to take pain medication, she would have to remain in jail for at least four more hours for observation. She told Salon that, based on comments from a number of officers, she believed she was soon to be released and so declined the medication, but was then held for six more hours.

“It was more than dehumanizing,” said Eisenberg, noting how lucky she felt that her detainment was so brief compared to long-term inmates.

Sgt. J.D. Nelson of the Alameda Sheriff’s Department said the allegations of mistreatment were “not true.” He described the claims of abuse and beatings as “ridiculous.” He also told Salon that, to his knowledge, no legal proceedings have currently been filed against the department relating to these allegations. When questioned  about reports that medication was withheld from HIV-positive detainees, Nelson said it was the first he had heard of this and noted that all detainees are seen by a medical professional. “People make claims,” he said, “I’m not saying it’s true or not true. A claim is a claim.”

Lamprecht told Salon that the National Lawyers Guild’s first concern would be to address charges facing any of the 400 people arrested during Saturday’s action before considering whether to pursue civil suits against the Sheriff’s Department.

According to the 28-year-old who was denied access to his anti-retroviral treatment, the events at Santa Rita created new, unexpected affinities. “Some of the prisoner orderlies were so inspired by our agitation in jail that they approached us (when out from under the eyes of the guards) and told us they would be joining us at Oscar Grant Plaza when they had finished their time,” he said.

When I’d first started visiting the camp back in October, I hadn’t been sure about it either, but after I’d been there several times, I saw something beautiful grow that I’d never expected. So, I’ve learned to give Occupy Oakland the benefit of the doubt.

The day began with a rally at noon at Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza. I asked many people if they were planning to enter the building. Almost everyone said they were uncertain, they would wait and see how things were going. There were about 500 people gathered.

The march to the building left at 1 PM. Right away a man tried to drive his car through the march. He got mad, the protesters got mad and it did not look good. Some people stepped in, cleared the way, and after a while he drove off. The tension of that moment carried through most of the day and into the night, though there were moments of relief too.

After a few blocks, we came across police blocking off certain streets, herding the protesters through Laney College. By this time there were over 1,000 protesters. It was becoming clear that the police knew where the protesters were going; the secrecy was in vain. I ended up walking around and taking a different route, as I had promised myself I wouldn’t get arrested or hurt. I learned the targeted building was the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, and I proceeded there with caution. The Kaiser Center is vacant and is not currently in use.

As I watched the larger group moving toward the building, it looked like a trap. Very soon after the protesters arrived at the Kaiser Center, the police fired tear gas into the crowd. Those of us standing two blocks away could taste it. Later, when I spoke to people who had been at the front, everyone said they Occupiers had done nothing to provoke the tear gas other than arriving at the building.

The police had effectively made it impossible for the Occupiers to carry out their plan, so the protesters moved on. A few blocks away a standoff occurred. The police fired many things into the crowd; some thought it was tear gas, some thought it was pepper spray bombs. Also, I believe this was when they fired some bean bag shots at the crowd, later I met one man who had been hit.

Eventually people went back to the plaza. It was announced that we would take a break and then attempt to try to Occupy a different building.

One of the remarkable things about Occupy is how kind people are to each other. As I have at other protests here, I met many good and decent people with whom I had great conversations. Most of these people really care about the state of our world, and have embraced this movement with gratitude for having a place where they can figure out ways to take that caring and turn it into tangible action.

I point this out because no matter what the mainstream media says about Saturday’s action, there’s a big piece of the story that can only be absorbed by walking with these people and getting to know them. The heart of Occupy Oakland is so good. It’s been a bit broken by all the repressive police actions, ranging from waging war on the Occupiers the day of the first raid, to arresting people for things as petty as taking a blanket out of a garbage can. In spite of all the attempts to break the the movement’s heart and destroy it, it continues on, beating strongly and moving forward.

When it was time to begin the second march, the crowd was probably back down to about 700. The group remained remarkably upbeat and determined. We arrived at the “alternate” building, and got herded away by the police. So people marched around, continually getting corralled and surrounded. I stayed behind, and the friend I was walking with noticed police coming at us from both directions. We decided to get out as it looked like a bad place to be. Our only exit was toward the police. On our way, an officer told us to turn around. I held out my homemade press pass and said we just wanted to leave. He told us we couldn’t and said, “You choose to be here.” He sounded pretty angry, and we were getting worried. We turned around, which basically meant we were heading right into the adjacent street where everyone was being corralled. But, the police veered towards that crowd, leaving enough of a gap for us to move past them and get out.

There was a wire fence on one side of the Occupiers, and some of them pushed it down and everyone escaped across a vacant lot. They ended up in front of the YMCA on Broadway. I heard reports that some protesters entered the building and ran out the back. A large group in front of the Y got surrounded by police. Many were arrested.

It was later reported that some people had broken into City Hall. I went down there and they had come out of the building and police were blocking it off. Someone burned an American flag, which I’m sure will be the most written about moment of the day.

I saw ambulances coming down the street. I saw a very young woman on the ground. She had been beaten earlier, and she had to go to the hospital. She was screaming in pain as they carried her on a stretcher to the ambulance. Apparently her only crime had been being present at the protest when she was beaten by the police.

I heard similar stories of the police randomly beating people or arresting them throughout the day, often just going for whomever was closest. The radio (KCBS) said over 300 people were arrested, which explains why by 11 PM there were so few people around.

The Oakland Police were recently court ordered to report their actions to a federally approved overseer. If the cops don’t keep their violence in check, the judge will put the department under federal administration. I couldn’t help but wonder if the department just decided to give a big screw you to the judge and take their brutality to the next level.

Whether the action of Occupy Oakland was right or wrong, the tactics and actions of the OPD I witnessed and heard of were pretty extreme, and they behaved irresponsibly toward the citizens who weren’t involved in any of this. While walking along Lake Merritt to the Henry Kaiser Center, I saw two mothers pushing strollers with young children. They didn’t look like Occupiers, so I stopped them and warned them there was tear gas ahead. They gave me an unbelieving look, and then glanced around, and realized I was right. They turned around, fairly disturbed. There should have been officers on the periphery to warn people what was going on.

Later in the night I saw some graffiti, a few things like newspaper racks thrown into the street. As always, these actions were the work of a small group. The vast majority of people I talked to throughout the day were committed to non-violence and to not vandalizing property. The radio reported three police were injured. They weren’t specific about the level of injury.

There were some bright moments too: Marching to happy dance music at dusk, just before the police corralled everyone. A group that broke into a nice version of the Star Spangled Banner at the Y in front of the police. A man I didn’t know who smiled and waved at me, just being friendly. All the kind people I met, and all the people I’ve met before who came up and said hi. The good people I walked with throughout the day.

Right or wrong, I knew I was marching with people who care, who care enough to risk being assaulted by the police, to risk arrest and injury. Some might look at that and think it’s insane. I think insanity is looking at how things are these days and doing nothing. I’m open to other ideas. But for now, Occupy is the best idea around. Even when it’s a mess, and things don’t go right, and I’m not sure what I think, it’s a great, inspiring idea.

So we should put Monday’s action into perspective. As Andrew Leonard pointed out, there is almost no way to effectively target the 1 percent without causing serious collateral damage among the many workers who are just barely scraping by. And so Leonard argued that a prolonged port shutdown would devastate California, while leaving Goldman Sachs comparatively untouched. In “The costs of a port shutdown,” he declares that “Despite noble intentions, Occupy’s tactic hurt a wounded economy more than it hurt the 1 percent.”

Leonard has a point. It would be callous to deny that Monday’s work stoppage hurt “independent” truck drivers who lost a day of work. This is a serious thing; as Leonard himself reported two months ago, being one of the 82 percent of truck drivers who are classified as “independent contractors” means being responsible for all the costs of driving a truck without any of the protection afforded to employees. So when a driver can’t bring in any income—say, because protesters have blockaded the port—drivers will still be on the hook for costs of the operation, paying overhead without any income.

It is hardly surprising that some independent truck drivers were quite upset about the shutdown; Gavin Aronsen of Mother Jones reported that a trucker on Oakland said he risked losing $200 to $400 in pay, and even kicked over a sign reading “truckers have rights to union wages.”

At the same time, this was not a prolonged port shutdown. The longest lasting blockade was in Oakland – in which I took part – where one shift was actively blocked and the two shifts following it were preemptively canceled by the port. And on Tuesday, when ILWU workers asked the occupiers to allow the port to re-open, Occupy Oakland complied. Those ships are being unloaded right now, and truckers are back on the road.

We need a sense of perspective here. On the one hand, anyone who thought a one-day disruption of West Coast ports was going to bring Goldman Sachs to its knees is out of their minds. I don’t know anyone who believed that was going to happen. But actions like this one keep the movement alive, something that has very much been in question.

When police destroyed Occupy Oakland’s camp, for example, they scattered and fragmented its occupants (who cannot reoccupy the space, by the way, because the city leaves sprinklers on to keep the ground a saturated muddy mess, dubbed “Lake Quan”). And as Ben Ehrenreich puts it, with part one of the movement over, Occupy finds itself at a crossroads. Now that all the camps have been destroyed by concerted police crackdowns, does the Occupy movement even exist anymore? Monday’s action demonstrated that it does. When denied the local orientation of its roots, the Occupy movement is capable of playing another hand, even of raising the stakes.

Raising the stakes, of course, raises hard questions. On the other hand, what else is there? As we have learned, peacefully setting up camps — in one of the least confrontational forms of civil disobedience imaginable –  is something that American cities will simply not allow. So what is left to the Occupy movement but more aggressive and confrontational tactics? Since they are not allowed to camp peacefully in public parks, expect more work stoppages, more foreclosure defenses, and more building occupations.

I think this is a good thing, when put in proper perspective. Andrew Leonard’s argument is a common one: While protest is fine in theory, the cost of this particular protest is too onerous. But in an economy where every shock to the system disproportionately hurts the working class — first, last and worst — vulnerable workers will always serve as an effective human shield for the Goldman Sachs of the world, who will always be too big to fail. And if we wait for the magical silver bullet, and we do nothing until we find it, nothing will change. No target will ever be the right and perfect one, no action will ever specifically and exclusively target the 1 percent, and so we will take no action at all.

Inaction is unacceptable. As one of the truck drivers who wrote this eye-opening Open Letter From America’s Port Truck Drivers on Occupy the Port told Andrew Leonard a few months ago, “Every day is getting worse.” And from the beginning, Occupy Wall Street has argued one very simple thing: that our political and economic system is not only broken, but incapable of fixing itself; that the game is not only rigged, but closed to new players; that the status quo is not only bad, but radically unacceptable and getting worse, every day.

This fact changes the political calculus. The ongoing silent violence of the status quo is vastly greater than whatever very mild damage might have been caused by the port shutdown. Compared to the earthquake to working Californians, for example, that Gov. Jerry Brown’s trigger cuts will soon cause – not for one day, but with no end in sight – a day’s loss of wages is a relatively minor matter (if only relatively).

Which brings us back to the root problems that require more radical solutions. The port was the target in Oakland, after all, because it’s a public agency, owned and run by the city of Oakland and required by its charter to be run for the benefit of the city of Oakland at large. But, in practice, it isn’t, and in this sense, it’s a perfect symbol for the public subsidies to private industry that we all pay for, but from which only the 1 percent actually benefit.

While the infrastructure that makes the port’s activities possible – the railroads and freeways and utility grids – were all built by enormous public investment, and while the land was taken by eminent domain (in many cases, from disadvantaged African-American homeowners and businesspeople, in the days when Oakland was strictly segregated), very little of the enormous wealth passing through the port ever finds its way to Oakland’s impoverished schools, for example.

Oakland is not a poor city, as the president of the Oakland Education Association pointed out at an Occupy press conference, or at least it shouldn’t be. Its apparent poverty is a function of the shell game paid with the finances of the port, its major industry, which operates rent-free on public land. While bondholders absorb most of the profits from the original investment, operating profits from the port never seem to find their way back to Oakland’s coffers.

Instead they are being reinvested in making the port as profitable as possible for companies like SSA Marine shipping (in which Goldman Sachs is a primary investor), in real-estate speculation, or in things like making Oakland airport more accessible to the city’s wealthy travelers (while cutting funding for the buses used by lower-income workers).

In short, while Andrew Leonard is at least a little bit right to see a port blockade as something like cutting off the nose to spite the face, I want to offer another metaphor: stopping the port for a day was a poke in the eye to stop the mouth from eating its own hands.

(Read Leonard’s “The costs of a port shut down” here. See Leonard’s comments below.)